Client Stories
The people we work with include creative directors and marketing consultants, fast-moving tech entrepreneurs and the founders of independent restaurants – as well as providing financial directorship for larger businesses.
Scroll down to meet some of them here, learn what challenges they faced – and how we worked together so they can sleep at night.
Show Racism the Red Card
From the North East to Nationwide: Dockwray and Show Racism the Red Card
About
Show Racism the Red Card (SRtRC) is the UK’s leading anti-racism educational charity. Founded in 1996, the charity harnesses the status of football and its players to help tackle racism in society.
Today, SRtRC has offices across the UK and spreads its message to 50,000 people nationwide every year. In 2023, the charity celebrated a significant milestone – the engagement of more than a million people in its programmes.
How We Worked
Paul Kearns, Director of Operations, has been with the charity for 18 years. He was the sixth person to join the company when SRtRC was in its infancy in the North East. We sat down to discuss the service Dockwray provides to SRtRC and their uniquely intertwined histories…
In 2013, Dockwray founder Gill Brereton started working for us three days a week. In a relatively short time, she streamlined our processes so effectively that she started to do herself out of a job. What had previously taken three days a week could soon be completed in just one day.
At this point, Gill mainly handled our higher-level work. This included the reports for our Board of Trustees, working with senior management on their accounts, and working closely with myself and our external auditors.
By making our bookkeeping more efficient, Gill created more time to work on growing Dockwray Ltd while still providing us with the high-level support we needed.
At the start of 2023, we transitioned to a new business model and completely outsourced our entire financial department to Dockwray.
A Reliable and Professional Service
We rely on Dockwray for our complete finance function from A to Z, anything finance-related is now completely under their remit. This means that we don’t have to worry about our finances on a daily basis.
We have employees and freelancers up and down the country, and payroll is done twice a month so that our teams are never more than two weeks away from being paid.
They always make themselves available to answer any questions we have. I’m in regular contact with Dockwray throughout the month; depending on what’s going on, that can be once a week or once a day, depending on where we are. And there’s always flexibility, so our finances are never in doubt for an event that needs to be deposited ahead of time or paid outside the usual window.
The system we have in place with Dockwray is robust, which gives our teams on the ground peace of mind and enables them to focus on going out and spreading our message of anti-racism in the world.
Headliners
Making News Changing Lives
Meet the Client
Headliners is a charity based in the North East. It provides learning and development through journalism and active citizenship activities for children and young people aged 8-25. Headliners’ unique multi-media journalism programmes enable young people to share their views and opinions and ensure their voices can be heard.
Jon Hudson
The Challenges Facing the Charity Sector
The headline news about any charity that’s failed is that it’s due to poor financial management. They haven’t had the controls they needed in place to manage their income and expenditures and the right support to make difficult strategic decisions.
Most charities or businesses have an annual or quarterly relationship with their accountant. But to succeed, you need constant access to good financial advice. Charities generally struggle to get treasurers who are trained accountants onto their boards. And we spent a long time trying to find the right fit.
Here at Headliners, we sometimes have a turnover of over half a million pounds, much of which is grant-funded. So, the financial and programme requirements of what we have to report on are very high. We also constantly require project forecasting and an understanding of the costs and pressures on delivery that we have to put into every bid. And, so, we constantly draw upon financial expertise, which is where Dockwray comes in.
A Unique Service
Dockwray is more of an internal finance business partner than an accountant to us. For example, we faced some difficult choices in 2023. We had to make a number of roles redundant and restructure the organisation as the funding environment was challenging. Dockwray guided us through those challenges, helped us understand the risks, and gave us the confidence to make the right financial decisions.
Their support is reassuring because this is a complicated environment. Sometimes, you’re really successful at getting funding, and sometimes, it just ends. Having Dockwray on hand to deal with that constant chop and change is really helpful and has made Headliners as an organisation more resilient..
The Results
Thanks to Dockwray’s financial services, they have both supported us in bringing down our fixed costs through better management and reduced the need for a full-time finance resource internal to the organisation, further reducing our fixed costs. This means that we can better deliver our mission to help young people and ensure as much of the money we receive in donations as possible goes directly to supporting the young people we want to help.
With Dockwray, we feel reassured that competent people are in charge of our finances. It gives us a lot of confidence when we’re applying for funding, particularly from big grant funders.